CLM-access: A Specialized Foundation Model for High-dimensional Single-cell ATAC-seq analysis

Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, cell language models (CLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning cell representations from high-dimensional single-cell data—particularly transcriptomic profiles from scRNA-seq. These foundation models have shown remarkable potential across a variety of downstream applications. However, there remains a lack of foundation models for scATAC-seq data, which measures chromatin accessibility at single-cell level and is critical for decoding epigenetic regulation. Developing such models is considerably more challenging due to the unique characteristics of scATAC-seq data, including the vast number of chromatin regions, lack of standardized annotations, extreme sparsity, and near-binary distributions. To address these challenges, we systematically explore various strategies and propose CLM-access, a specialized foundation model for scATAC-seq data. CLM-access incorporates three main innovations: (1) an unified data processing pipeline that maps 2.8 million cells onto an unified reference of over 1 million chromatin regions; (2) a specialized patching and embedding strategy to effectively manage high-dimensional inputs; and (3) a tailored masking and loss function design that preserves fine-grained regional information while enhancing training efficiency and representation quality. With comprehensive benchmarks, we show that CLM-access significantly outperforms existing methods in key downstream tasks, including batch effect correction, cell type annotation, RNA expression prediction, and multi-modal integration. This work establishes a scalable and interpretable foundation model for single-cell epigenomic analysis and expands the application of CLMs in single-cell research. Code is available at https://github.com/HIM-AIM/CLM-access